ARTIST TALK: Michael Burten

All Art is Multimedia Art: The Word and the Image in Contemporary Experimental Fiction
Sunday, April 12th, 2026 at 5:30pm
Free & open to the public

Please join us for an evening with local novelist and photographer, Michael Burten. He will read from his forthcoming novel, THESE OUR GRAVES, and discuss how photography plays an ineluctable role in his work as a writer and how writing influences and drives his continued interest in photography.

THESE OUR GRAVES is a novel in three parts, traversing eighty years and two continents, from a mythical shtetl in Belarus to a lonely Brooklyn apartment in the nineteen-sixties; it is about an immigrant family, about dissidents and communist politics, about labor organizing, and about the faultlines that spring up in a family divided by money and privilege; in the end THESE OUR GRAVES hinges on the charred ruin of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and the 146 women and men who lost their lives to it. It is the story of Jewish radicalism in America: its successes, its failures, and maybe its future as well.

Like most disciplines, the arts have become atomized and increasingly siloed within their own worlds and academic disciplines; photographers are photographers, writers are writers, musicians are musicians, and all are expected to enact their arts in isolation. But photography and painting infect writing––as cover art, author portraits, and in some notable cases within the texts themselves––while writing coats gallery walls and covers photobook pages. Art infests art, inevitably, the image is omnipresent, the word über alles, the note the song the story the gesture: all art is multimedia art!

About the artist:

Michael Burten is a novelist, teacher, photographer, reader, and researcher. Michael Burten is a mediocre miniature painter, a terrible stick-figure maker, a failed
academic, and a surprisingly good wedding planner. Most days, Michael Burten is a professional chef and chauffeur for a toddler. He lives in a village in Western Massachusetts with his family and is working on his fourth novel. He promises them (and his agent) this time he’s selling out.

 

This event is free, open to all, and no advance registration is required. We hope to see you there! 

Find a complete list of upcoming artist talks and events at VCP here.